


Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree (with anyone else but me)

by AldaratheAlbatross



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: But with a happy ending, F/M, Howling Commandos - Freeform, Light Angst, M/M, Multi, One Shot, There are a lot of super soldiers in this story, World War Threesome, as my roommate said 'rated G for gay', old war songs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2019-12-15
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:55:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21802531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AldaratheAlbatross/pseuds/AldaratheAlbatross
Summary: Bittersweet things come in threes
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers
Comments: 2
Kudos: 32





	Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree (with anyone else but me)

Here’s what happens second: Erskine and Philipps between them pick Steve Rogers out of training camp, stick him in Stark’s machine, and he comes out twice his original size and nearly glowing. Peggy isn’t quick enough to stop the mole from making off with the rest of the serum, Erskine dies, and his perfect formula dies with him. Steve Rogers is the only one of his kind.

Or, well,

Here’s what happens first: Margaret Carter just happens to be in the room when Stark and Erskine come to the SSR and say they’ve got it. They tested it on rats and it probably worked, the rats seemed stronger and smarter but they can’t really be sure, they need to try it on a human subject. The SSR asks how long until they know for sure, not ‘probably’, and Stark shrugs.

“How long do rats normally live?”

Three years is too long to wait, Stark, says the SSR. If there’s no measurable difference it’s not enough anyways. Figure it out.

She waits until everyone else is gone and Stark and Erskine are left in a lab and she offers to bring them another cup of tea. Then she makes her move.

“You really think you’re ready for a human trial?” She pours a third cup of tea for herself and looks up to see Erskine’s slow nod, the gleam in Stark’s eye.

Three days later she’s sitting in a chair, teeth gritted as Stark (“Call me Howard, Carter, we’re friends now.” “You make friends with all your test subjects, Howard?”) and Erskine look for what seems like every large vein in her body, injecting serum straight into her bloodstream. Her body is on fire but she doesn’t make a sound, just waits for it to work, to do something. When they’re done, Howard helps her stand.

“How do you feel?” He’s so eager and curious. Erskine just watches with a critical eye.

Not good. The burning sensation is fading but it’s left her exhausted, and when Howard lets go she nearly falls over. Howard seems disappointed but not ready to let it go just yet.

“Get some sleep and come back in three days. That’s how long it took the rats.” So she does, and in three days she feels healthy as a horse and lifts some boxes for Howard, but nothing exceptional. He and Erskine go back to the drawing board, muttering something about radiation. None of them bother telling the brass that they tested the serum— no point in mentioning a failed experiment that they weren’t supposed to perform in the first place.

A week later, in the privacy of her own rooms, she lifts her bed off the floor to look for a dropped hairpin. She thinks about telling someone, but something holds her back, and soon it doesn’t matter because Stark comes around raving about his Vita-Rays, and Steve Rogers jumps on a dummy grenade, and Peggy stops thinking for a moment about what she could do and starts thinking about a man like Steve Rogers.

If the super-soldier serum does as Erskine suggests and amplifies everything that a person had in them, Peggy becomes bolder and smarter and sneakier, and her temper turns on a dime. Steve will become a hero, will never give up, will be the perfectly honourable soldier, and Peggy can already tell that his stubbornness will more than match her temper. Even before he climbs into Stark’s machine, she’s a little bit in love. Then Erskine is shot, and Steve Rogers is the only one of his kind. Peggy goes off to the front and leaves Steve to sell war bonds in Wisconsin.

Or, well,

Because all good things come in threes, here’s what happens third: Hydra can use any old prisoners for hard labour, because the Nazis have a lot of them. But there’s no point in not starting as you mean to go on, so they test their own serum on captured soldiers, the strongest and most well-fed, hand-picked from the allied prisoners, just to see how strong they can get. They gamble with their potential brainwashing technology, a way to make use of those soldiers if the serum works, but they don’t get to test it because Peggy and Howard drop Steve behind enemy lines and grab supper while Steve liberates the whole base. Peggy meets him back at camp, tells him he’s late. Nobody knows just then about the third thing, the thing that could have been bad but has, just now, swung in their favour.

She goes to a pub full of soldiers, which would be dangerous if she thought anyone but Steve was stronger or faster than her, and she goes in a red dress just to see how Steve will respond to provocation. She doesn’t stay long but it’s long enough to see how Barnes watches Steve flirt with her, how he seems almost angry. There’s a bitter twist to his mouth, a sourness when he speaks, and it makes a matching sourness twist in her belly. She walks away without calling him out on it, without really speaking with him at all, but then, none of them know just then that he’s their third good thing.

A couple nights later she goes to the pub again, this time dressed as a man. She likes to blend in, when she can, likes the freedom of it. Tonight she uses that freedom to watch Steve without being watched in return. He’s drinking with his newly recruited team, the ragtag group gathered around one table. There’s a certain desperation to all of them, all but Steve still newly returned from being prisoners of war, and that’s what Peggy notices first. Whenever anyone is looking they’re all making merry, but whenever nobody’s watching each one stares down into his drink like it’s betrayed him. This is the first clue. Each one hides his confusion from his companions— she’s the only one who sees. She looks down at her own drink; it’s her fourth, because she can’t get drunk.

Despite what people may think, she does have a real job, planning and fighting and spying with the SSR, and that means that she only sees Steve and his Howling Commandos on occasion, and even more rarely in combat. They don’t seem to have noticed anything off about each other, though Steve tells her stories of how Dernier walks out of his own explosions, how Bucky can practically see in the dark, how Morita can make a radio out of anything, intercept any transmissions, how they make spectacular leaps and survive against the odds. She suspects that the only thing that keeps the Commandos from feats of strength to rival their leader’s is that they don’t know they could do it. It’s not until she sees them planning and practising for an assault, moving just a touch too fast, a bit too perfectly, that she’s sure. The Howling Commandos are just too good to be normal.

While Steve tells her about his men’s heroics, always downplaying his own, Barnes swans around them singing _He’s just a fellow on a furlough/out looking for a dream/the one who’s in his dreams/ev’ry night_ and laughing as Steve turns bright red. Peggy doesn’t mind the singing, though she’s nobody’s guiding light or girl of their dreams. If she thought she might love Steve Rogers when he was jumping on grenades, she’s quite certain now, and besides, none of the Commandos treat her like their Captain’s girl, despite the teasing. Peggy has trouble with most soldiers, with getting them to listen to her and respect her, but never with the Howling Commandos— the first desegregated military squad to even be associated with the US Army, the type of people who will follow a man like Steve Rogers because none of them like bullies. Peggy is respected here, even by Barnes, though he teases.

She’s sure she’s not supposed to notice how Barnes looks at Steve when he’s not trying to make Steve embarrassed, but she does. She notices how his mouth twists like he’s bitten into a lemon when he sees her kissing Steve outside his tent, and she sees how he stares at Steve from afar like Steve is the only thing worth living for. She sees how he defends Steve fiercely and how he makes sure Steve and Peggy get their time alone together, how he makes his men laugh and how he’s the voice of reason. She watches him hover around Howard, alight with curiosity; she watches him slide some of his rations in front of whichever Commando looks the hungriest when they’re not paying attention. She knows Steve sees it too. When she’s looking, it’s not hard to see how Steve looks at her like she’s the sun and at Bucky like he’s the air he breathes.

She’s not surprised. It’s whispered everywhere that, at war, you take what comfort you can, and Peggy’s met men who may never have thought of it if they weren’t in a trench, absolutely. But she knows others, too. She remembers Lewis, a colleague of hers at the SSR, fit and brave and a good soldier, and the way his face paled when he saw his blue ticket. She remembers liaising with the WAC for all of a week, the openly appreciative stares she got walking across the open parade ground, nearly making her blush. Further back it’s Rosie and Margery at Bletchley Park, Michael’s quiet childhood friend David (Michael had been, perhaps, David’s only friend, but Michael had been fearless and loyal and always stood up against bullies because he did what was right, and though Peggy has mostly shaken off the childhood dream of being just like her older brother, that particular trait has remained). No, that Steve and Barnes might be so in love and have never told each other is hardly surprising, and it’s been years since she’s thought about it being wrong.

The other thing that she’s heard people say, so far under their breath that the thought is nearly buried, is that, at war, you see what’s evil, and perhaps you stop caring about the kinds of things that never hurt anyone. Peggy has been in the war for years, now, and she’s seen what’s evil, and what’s just a bit different. There’s not much to decide about, when it comes to what to do about Steve and Barnes. She’s just got to decide what to do with herself.

And, well, it’s certainly not proper, but Peggy left her fiancé to work in espionage, secretly got herself dosed with a highly suspect serum, and then took a command post in the middle of a war, so she figures she left proper behind a long time ago. Steve is upright and bold and steady, and Barnes is funny and clever and kind, and when she sees them, together or apart, the world gets a bit brighter. So when the Commandos are in the same camp as her, and she and Falsworth have sung _There’ll always be an England_ while they all pretend they’re getting drunker, and Barnes has teased Steve by singing directly to Peggy _don’t sit under the apple tree/with anyone else but me/anyone else but me/anyone else but me_ , Peggy takes her chance. She leans back against Steve’s broad chest and takes another drink, watching Barnes’ eyes glinting in the firelight, and sings back _kiss me goodnight, Sergeant-Major!_ It only takes one line to have the Commandos all roaring with laughter at her boldness and Barnes’ surprise. Steve seems startled, too— she feels his chest hitch and hears his sharp gasp, but he doesn’t move. Barnes is staring at them both and for a brief moment he looks pained, but he shakes it off and turns back to his joking with the other men. Eventually the Commandos go to bed. Peggy, Steve, and Barnes do not.

“So, Carter, still looking for that kiss?” Barnes lights a cigarette and raises a cocky eyebrow.

“And what if I were, Sergeant?”

“Peggy-” Steve starts, nudging her up off his chest so they can see each others’ faces. He doesn’t seem to know where to go with his sentence.

“Steve,” Peggy answers, reaching up to brush his frown with her fingers. “Are you or are you not in love with Barnes?” Across the fire, Barnes chokes on his cigarette smoke. Steve looks panicked. “Just trust me,” she says.

“Always,” Steve manages to answer, but his voice is tight.

“Do you love him?” Steve nods, swallows, and squares his shoulders. “For years,” he admits, very quietly.

Peggy turns to Barnes, who has stopped coughing, but before she can ask him he nods too. He’s struggling to stand up, and for a moment her heart stops— he’s going to walk away now, she’s taken the wrong tack and ruined the whole thing— but he only moves over to sit closer to them. In the firelight she can see that he’s pale and a bit shaky.

“Why are you asking, Carter?” he asks hoarsely.

“I’ve always loved Bucky, Peggy, but—” Steve is still struggling, so she gives him a smile to reassure him. “But it doesn’t mean I don’t love you. I do!” He insists, earnestly. “You might not believe me but I really do love you, Pegs.” There’s a plea in his voice.

“Of course I believe you, you idiot,” Peggy says sharply, suddenly frustrated with Steve’s obliviousness. He startles and sits up straight at the edge in her voice. Barnes chuckles from Steve’s other side, and Peggy glares at him. He stops, holding up his hands defensively.

“Hey, Carter, I see where you’re going, I’m not laughing at you,” he protests. He still seems wary, but maybe a bit less so than he was when they started this conversation.

“At least somebody does,” she says. Steve looks back and forth between them, face cycling through confusion, realization, shock, and hope. She takes pity on him and reins in her frustration. “Of course you can love me and Barnes at the same time, Steve,” she says quietly. “It’s perfectly possible to love more than one person at once. I’ve been doing it for months, after all.” And she looks over to see Barnes’ jaw drop. It’s her turn to laugh. “What did you think I was going to propose, Barnes?”

The hoarseness is back in Barnes’ voice. “I thought maybe you would offer to share,” he admits, “But I didn’t think of this.”

“Oh no,” says Peggy. “My mother had great difficulty convincing me to share anything. I’ve always wanted everything for myself.” This makes Barnes laugh again, louder and freer this time.

“Well,” he leans back on his hands and gives her a bright grin, “I can’t say I object.” Peggy wants to sigh in relief— that’s one question answered— but she worries it would give Steve the wrong impression.

She turns to him. “What do you think, Steve? The three of us?”

Instead of answering, Steve bends his head to kiss her, warm and sweet, then rests his forehead against hers.

“Do I get one?” Barnes complains when they spend too long looking into each others’ eyes. Steve lets her pull away from his chest so that he can turn to Barnes on his other side. They both hesitate for a moment, inches from each other, and Peggy can see the years of tension and fear between them. She waits, letting them figure it out together, and after a moment Steve just leans in and kisses him, and the tension shatters.

When they break apart, they both look over to her. She grins and starts to sing _Kiss me goodnight, Sergeant-Major!_ but she’s cut off halfway through the line by Barnes’ lips on hers.

Steve may be reckless with himself, but never with others. “Are you sure? It could be dangerous. I’m not even sure how it would work, three of us.” Steve has no nervous ticks; he simply sits very still, and right how he’s a statue beneath their two bodies.

Peggy shrugs. “We would have to be careful, obviously. No leaping before we looked,” she gives Steve a hard look, “we would have to watch what we said and how we moved and not tell a soul, not even any of the Commandos.” She taps his chest with her fingertips, makes sure he’s really listening. “But I do want you, Steve. Both of you.”

“We would have to pretend it was still just the two of you,” Barnes chimes in, leaping right into planning, “I would be your chaperone. I already am, anyways. People would hardly notice a difference, really.” He looks up. “Well, Stevie?”

“I—” Steve stops, takes a deep breath. “Yes. I want to try, yes.” It’s like Steve’s answer releases a knot in her chest that’s been stopping her from breathing. She gasps in air once, twice, then starts to laugh, little giggles of relief and delight. She has to wave off Steve’s concerned hands, but Barnes just laughs along with her.

“You’re something else, Carter,” he says, chuckling.

“Peggy,” says Peggy when she stops laughing, “Call me Peggy.”

Barnes raises an eyebrow at her. “Marge,” he tries.

“Absolutely not.”

“Damn,” says Barnes, but he’s grinning widely.

Peggy starts calling Barnes ‘James’ when there’s nobody around to hear. Only Steve calls him ‘Bucky’, but that’s how the world will remember him.

Next time the Commandos head out on a mission, Steve kisses her chastely goodbye behind a tree on the edge of camp, and James watches from afar, eyes burning like he’s willing them to remember how he kissed them last night away from prying eyes.

One night when they are lying together in Steve and James’ tent, before Peggy is quite ready to get up and sneak back to her own tent so they don’t get caught, she feels James shift to look at Steve over her head.

“Why did you never tell me?” he asks, very quietly.

Everything shifts as Steve moves to look back. “You liked girls,” he says. “Why would I get in the way?”

“I loved you.”

“Why did you never tell me?” Steve turns the question back. In the dim light, Peggy can see the wry twist to James’ smile.

“I thought it was obvious,” he says, with that melancholic undertone he often has. “I thought you knew.”

“Madge?”

“No.”

“Maisie?”

“No.”

“Greta?”

“I could call you Jamey.”

“Yes, Peggy.”

James falls from a train, and none of them can get drunk. Not Steve, when she finds him in a bombed-out bar, and not her when she joins him trying to drink the whole place dry. Steve is too far gone in his grief to notice how long she’s matched him drink for drink.

When they meet up with the Commandos the next day it’s clear they were all drinking until the early hours: they’re tired and reeking of alcohol but stone-cold sober and for once none of them are willing to pretend.

Steve crashes the Valkyrie into the Arctic Ocean and Peggy listens to the radio static like his voice will come through any second, like she’ll hear him radio in a successful mission, bickering with James as he waits until Steve’s report is over to croon _Don’t go walking down lover’s lane/with anyone else but me_. The other officers always think he’s just teasing Steve, but they three know he’s singing right to her.

But the radio offers only static.

At first, when the war is finally over, she tries to move on. She doesn’t speak much with the soldiers she used to work with, and she tries not to think about them much either. She doesn’t think about staying up late, warm between two other bodies, talking about their unrealised futures, and she turns off the radio when Vera Lynn is singing _we’ll have time for things like wedding rings/and free hearts will sing._

Instead, she works with the SSR, founds SHIELD, maybe falls in love with another man. He’s a good man, Daniel, he respects her, he stands up for what he believes in. But they both do dangerous work, just can’t find the time to get married, can’t agree on when, and one day she’s thirty and doesn’t look a day over twenty-two. Who is she to bring someone else into this mess? She breaks her engagement again and starts using makeup to make herself look older.

Howard notices, shows up at her door one day and says “It worked after all.”

Peggy answers “Steve was the only one of his kind, Howard.” Howard only tries once more to get her to let him reproduce the serum from her blood. She breaks his jaw.

When she’s thirty-four, she calls the rest of the original Howling Commandos to her one day. Falsworth and Dugan, Jones and Morita and Dernier, they all look just like they did eight years ago when the war ended. She sits them down for a cup of tea and says “Retire.”

They protest, of course. “We’re doing some good, Carter,” says Falsworth, sipping his tea.

“We’re not old enough to retire,” Dugan adds.

“We’re fit as fiddles, Director,” says Morita.

“That’s the problem,” says Peggy.

So, over the course of the next few years, the Commandos fake injuries: a shattered leg, a dangerous bullet wound, burns. Or rather, they take injuries, and pretend to heal worse and more slowly than they do. And one by one they honourably retire to live with their families. Peggy insists on sending herself out into the field and comes back with a terrible injury of her own, retires at the age of forty-five before looking old gets to be too much for makeup. When she looks in the mirror at her own clear face she still looks like she’s in her twenties.

She lifts her bed clear off the floor to find a dropped hairpin, and perhaps to remind herself that she can. She’s been hiding this from everyone for over twenty years now, and she has no way of knowing what she can really do or what to expect. So she goes to Howard Stark.

She still won’t let him try to reconstruct the serum, but she will let him run tests, see how strong she is, how fast she can run, how smart she is. In return, he keeps her abreast of the work he’s doing for SHIELD, so that even though she’s retired she can keep an eye on their organisation.

Howard has a son and makes her little Anthony’s godmother. Maria is a socialite, too busy to give Tony her attention or to care about her genius son’s interests. Howard is too busy building weapons and too stuck on the idea of Captain America to see the little boy right in front of him for what he is. Peggy lets Tony be a child in her living room, lets him play and learn and be loved. She’ll tell him as many stories of Captain America as he wants, but unlike Howard she never tells Tony to be more like Steve.

“You’ll be Tony Stark, and that’s just how you ought to be.”

She’s sure Tony figures out that she doesn’t look nearly as old as she ought to be by the time that he’s ten, but he never asks and she never wants him to have to keep her secrets. She does put him in touch with the children and grandchildren of the Howling Commandos, but he doesn’t talk to them much, too busy rejecting Cap and his father’s expectations.

Later, when she sees Tony in the news, always seeming moments from breaking apart, she wishes he would return her calls. Even later, when Tony goes missing, she’s moments from calling up the Commandos and going after him herself when Rhodes finds him. Later still, when Pepper Potts becomes CEO of Stark Industries, Peggy suddenly starts hearing from Tony again.

They find Steve in 2012, and at first they don’t tell her. They let him wake up alone, and she gets the news from her grand-niece a month later. She breaks three ugly vases in succession by hurling them at the window, and then she calls up the Howling Commandos.

This is what happens first: Peggy Carter and the Howling Commandos show up at SHIELD headquarters in New York. Peggy Carter is ninety-one years old and she hardly looks thirty, and the Commandos don’t seem much older, in their late forties maybe, though they’re nearly a hundred. When the security guards try to deny them entrance, Peggy picks up the front desk, holds it up like she’s going to use it to rush the entrance, and says quite calmly “We’re here to see Captain Rogers.”

When Peggy and the Commandos walk into the gym where Steve is at a punching bag, and he sees them huddled in the doorway, they all break down. Eventually Steve wipes away tears, says “How?” and Jones shrugs.

“You remember how you found us on those operating tables? Well,” And Steve looks at Peggy and she finally tells him about Howard and Erskine and the human trial, and Steve Rogers is not the only one of his kind.

They all go to Peggy’s house and sit around talking. Nobody pretends they’re getting drunk because they don’t have to anymore, but Peggy and Falsworth sing _There’ll always be an England,_ and everyone thinks of the last missing link and someone sings, quietly, _Kiss me goodnight, Sergeant-Major,_ and they laugh but it’s still terribly sad.

Once the rest of the Commandos have left, Peggy goes over to the ancient record player she could never bear to get rid of and pulls out a record. She and Steve dance slowly around her living room, much too slowly for the song playing.

_Don’t sit under the apple tree/with anyone else but me/anyone else but me..._

This is what happens second: life goes on. Steve tells SHIELD that he’s tired of war, but he never could let bullies win, so when Nick Fury calls and tells them that there’s a megalomaniac terrorising crowds in Germany, Steve takes up the shield and saves the world again. The megalomaniac turns out to be the Norse god Loki, bringing an alien invasion, and the world is stranger than Peggy ever imagined it could be, despite everything.

Steve and Peggy go out for breakfasts and lunches and dinners, go running long loops through Central Park, walk through Brooklyn and avoid the statue of Captain America, and Peggy tells Steve what she did while he slept. Occasionally they go to bookshops or coffee shops in the evenings, because Steve has learned he likes Slam poetry. They cling to each other’s hands as they stand in the shadows as the Pride parade goes by, go home and cry. Steve sketches matching portraits of James and Peggy laughing together, then pictures of the three of them, sitting around the fire, fighting together, lying in bed with the covers tucked up around them. Some of them he sells, then donates the money to SAGE and FIERCE and any organisation that gets in touch with him. Some, like the one of James watching two shadowy figures kissing behind a tree, mouth all bitter-twisted and eyes hot, he donates to the Leslie-Lohman Museum. Peggy is reminded why she loves him so dearly.

Peggy thinks that if she never took that serum maybe she would have moved on, married Daniel, lived as normal a life as Margaret Elizabeth Carter was capable of. As it is she thinks she could never have watched a husband grow old, never let another man she loved die while she kept on living.

She hasn’t been alone, these seventy years, hasn’t been idly waiting. She’s had work to do, even when she was doing it behind the scenes with Howard acting for the both of them. She’s glad to have Steve back anyways. She’s glad they’re all here for him, that he is not alone either.

Peggy makes Steve make new friends as well as spending time with old ones, and Steve doesn’t seem to mind too much. Peggy likes Steve’s new friends, especially since they’re also friends with Tony, likes that they’re a good team. The Commandos were a great team, but they really are retired. They’ve all said very clearly that they’re not going to fight for anything less than the end of the world (though the alien invasion nearly convinced them). But they get together a couple times a month, even if Falsworth and Dernier mostly join them by Skype.

Steve and Peggy go on dates and it mostly works. They agree that if they ever think they can get through a wedding ceremony without being sick, they’ll get married, but, well,

Because all bittersweet things come in threes, here’s what happens third: SHIELD turns out to be full of Hydra. Peggy comes out of retirement to join Steve and his new friends in taking it down, stopping Project Insight. She knows they probably didn’t need her help, that she could have kept herself secret a little longer, but she couldn’t rest with Insight programmed to kill everyone she loved, with missiles trained on the Commandos and aimed at her godson. She’s so angry she’s vibrating, thinks her hands might shake too much to fire a gun, but it turns out her rage can freeze her, too, keep her steady and focused. Steve is talking about freedoms and rights but Peggy’s just mad, absolutely furious that this ever escaped her, and she’s going to burn the whole thing to the ground. They send the helicarriers crashing into the Potomac and it’s a good start.

And the Winter Soldier is James ‘Bucky’ Barnes.

“Who the hell is Bucky?” he asks them, staring at them without recognition, and then he runs.

It’s not the end of the world, but the Commandos come out of retirement for this. At first they’re planning to look for the Winter Soldier directly, but in tracking him they soon realise that he’s going after Hydra bases, so they just do the same. They must be quite a sight, the seven of them, leaping the walls and throwing around tanks.

“Feels like we’re fighting a war that ended seventy years ago,” says Jones as they storm a base on Germany’s west border. The landscape is, indeed, familiar. They laugh, and Falsworth sings _We’re going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried line/have you any dirty washing, Peggy dear?_ and they laugh even harder. Because they’re in Germany again, they sing a bit more as they finish up with their work, checking for any information on the Winter Soldier or other Hydra bases, then burning the place to the ground. As they watch it burn, Peggy sees Steve looking away, out into the woods, and she looks too.

He’s there, James, and he’s watching them, and Steve hums a snatch of song, just loud enough that James obviously hears. His eyes widen, and he runs off again. Peggy wonders if, as he was watching them, he remembered anything. At the next base she thinks she feels his eyes again, so she grabs Steve in the middle of the fight and kisses him, willing James to remember that too.

When there are no more bases to find, when they’re sure, they go to London and Peggy pays to buy out a pub for the night, uses their reputation to keep it empty just for them. They sit around and don’t bother pretending to get drunk, and between them they teach Steve a few new songs, songs for the end of war. _When the lights go on again, all over the world_ they sing, teaching Steve as they go, _when the boys come home again..._ Peggy doesn’t resent Vera Lynn anymore.

The Winter Soldier comes in through the window in the early hours of the morning and sits on the sill, just watching them. They only talk a little longer then, as he watches them in silence. One by one, the Commandos leave, wishing everyone a good night. They each turn to their Sergeant on the way out, give him a neat salute, say “Goodnight, Sarge,” as they go. He looks startled every time, but by the time Dugan slips away he’s with it enough to nod back, watching Dugan’s back as the door swings shut. Then it’s just the three of them again at last. Peggy, Steve, and their third good thing.

 _Kiss me goodnight, Sergeant-Major!_ Steve sings, a bit off key, voice husky. Peggy picks up from him but her voice is no better all of a sudden. _We all love you, Sergeant-Major._

There’s that bitter twist to James’ mouth again, just like that night seventy years ago, but Peggy isn’t walking out without fixing it this time. She grabs Steve’s hand with one of hers, and reaches out the other to the windowsill.

And suddenly James is moving, crashing into them both so that they stumble backwards, and they’re all crying, and Peggy can hear James saying their names over and over again, _Steve, Peggy, Stevepeggysteve_ and they cry until they’ve cried themselves out.

Here’s what happens next: three people live in an old brownstone in Brooklyn, and a couple times a month they get visits from old men and the whole household pretends to get a bit drunk. Sometimes they have nightmares, and sometimes one or two or all of them dress up and save the world. And sometimes in the evenings they put a record onto an old, well-maintained Victrola, and dance in the living room. _Don’t sit under the apple tree/with anyone else but me/anyone else but me/anyone else but me._ The townhouse is filled with laughter and the sound of shoes clicking on hardwood, and one or two or three voices singing.

_Don’t sit under the apple tree_

_with anyone else but me_

_‘til I come marching home._


End file.
